Monthly Archives: March 2010

The folks that run DDD put on this special event which featured a whole day of presentations by the ‘one and only’ Scott Guthrie. The day started well with a personal hello from the man himself (OK, he just happened to look up as I got to the top of the stairs so I thrust my hand out and wished him a good morning). I have to admit that up to this point my only real thought about VS2010 was ‘oh, thank God, it runs my existing VS2008 projects just fine’. But Scott took us through the wealth of new and updated features, many of which were much more than ‘nice to haves’ We also got the best explanation of MVC (and MVVM) that I have heard, at the same time as introducing us to the new feature support in VS for these patterns. The day finished with a run through Windows Phone 7 and a great Q&A session. I got confirmation from Scott that the release of the windows phone will be the same in the UK as the US which is nice to know. I also asked Scott about the availability of “Silverlight on the iPhone” – a non committal response of “nothing to say about that today” – possibly implying that there might be something to say in the future? We shall see.

I blogged about this opportunity back in January and yesterday I and about a dozen other developers sat in with US based Blend Guru Adam Kinney to go over opportunities for working with Blend and Silverlight ‘from a design perspective’. In the morning Adam gave us a thorough interactive walk through of the principal design and development features available in Blend 4. I picked up a lot of useful knowledge which I hope to apply to my existing ongoing Silverlight projects! The afternoon was spent going through a training program that Adam brought with him (which I subsequently took back with me for extra “homework”!)

On the whole a very enjoyable and rewarding day. Much thanks to Microsoft and Adam for the opportunity!

It is an interesting time to be a Silverlight developer at the moment!

UPDATE: Having now caught up with some of the MIX sessions I would advise that the best way to manage a Desktop SIlverlight and WP7 App is together, in the same solution file using shared code. For more information on this check out sessions CL16 and CL17 from Mix10 available here.

Methodology Steps:

I created an empty WP7 app using Visual Studio Express for WP7

Copy and paste all items from desktop app (in the file system)

Imported all the desktop items into the WP7 app

Refactored all the namespaces (not strictly necessary if you decide to keep the same namespace)

Minor Issues I hit:

I had to delete the target elements from the Hyperlink controls as these are not supported in WP7 (see below)

I don’t have as many pixels as I though (I designed for 800×480 but the app is being cropped in the emulator? (turns out I had a margin set incorrectly!)

Sounds not playing?

* While the links remained after removal of he target attribute when selecting them in the emulator I get the following message (would have been nice top get the message in landscape mode, no doubt we will by the time we get to prod)

Other Issues

I added an extra line to let the phone know that I only support landscape Mode (SupportedOrientations= Supportedorientations.Landscape)

I’ve added a call top the VibrateController for a quick ‘buzz’ each time a difference is found.

Obviously the design of the app predated the guidelines and opportunities that the phone platform provides. (I plan on reviewing the design once I have the functionality sorted out).

And that was enough to get the app up and running on my (emulated) phone!!

Huzzah! But wait. I move my finger on the phone emulator, the magnifying glass moves CHECK. I find a difference and tap with a second finger OOPSnothing.So question now is:

Is my code for multitouch incorrect? (it worked on my Silverlight desktop OK)

I will update this post when I have the answer.

And here is that answer from the excellent free Peltzoid book:

Touch Events in Silverlight rlight 3, you know about the Touch.FrameReported event. In Windows Phone 7 Series programming, that event has become obsolete. ManipulationStarted, ManipulationInertiaStarting, ManipulationDelta, and ManipulationCompleted. These events are so sophisticated in incorporating concepts of velocity and inertia that they really acquire a ManipulationStarted just to detect …

STOP PRESS: Just submitted a proposal for a session so might be speaking:

This session will cover all aspects of the development of the public Silverlight based web site http://FromTheMalverns.com. Beginning with the background to the content on the site, how and why it came about moving through the technical aspects of preparing the content and finally how the site was put together to show the content in interesting and dynamic ways using Silverlight. Along the way I will also cover the following: